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[WIP] Melandis, a pavement desert city

After receiving many advices about how to draw a medieval-fantastic city built in a rock desert, I made some trials (unachieved for now as you will see).

I already made the walls and towers, but I didn't figure them on the map yet, due to a lack of time...

Buildings, fields and such things are also missing, that will come very soon, I hope. Same for the scale... the map is about a mile large (1,5 km), to give an idea. The city has about 15,000 inhabitants (100,000 was too much :p).

I'm still looking for a less repetitive (and seamless) pattern for the desert ; difficult to find any that could fit, in fact.

The desert pattern doesn't look too bad actually. Maybe you can increase the size of each tile or something so it will be less repetitive. Though I don't know what program you are using, and even if I did, I wouldn't know how to use it.

Anyway, I can picture this as divided into several different parts of a city. Hopefully the buildings you add will be awesome.

Best not to get stuck on things you can come back to later, especially when you're at the start of the map. I read some of the stuff you had posted about the desert city before this, and how it's supposed to be the capital and relatively new. Drawing the most attention possible to a few key buildings in the city would be really cool. Perhaps you could even label (or make known in some way) buildings like a tavern or blacksmith shop or etc...

As I said in the previous topic, this city is the one where my character in roleplay in writing lived for two years (and six years in real time). He was one of the leaders of the city, so I hope I will have ideas to figure the city... though it may be difficult to link writing and drawing... wait&see !

Changes : desert pattern, grass pattern are completely different. Don't know if they are convincing... desert is made of a real picture, maybe it is taken from too high ?

I added some fountains on market places and at the entrance of the middle-class quarter. Those are voluntarily huge compared to streets and future buildings next to them, because I think they are a sign of the richness of the city (at least, the middle class of the city).

And ONE house lost in the middle of nowhere This is just to see how shadows will react, and what size houses and other buildings shall have. I intend to make about twenty models of different houses and copy-paste them with orientation variations, of course. Roofs shall be different, mostly red tiles (it is a hot climate), but also thatch for farms and poorer-class houses... also, variations on shapes of the houses (rectangular, L-shaped, and so on).

Wow that's a pretty big improvement! A few points as always - would a city in the desert have a grass interior? Maybe some patches of grass but not golf-course material I wouldn't think. I think the next step for you (not an expert though) would probably be adding the city wall(s). That would blend the border between what is now grass and desert and I think would help you divide the city into different districts, if that's how you plan to go about it.

Interesting work so far...

The best maps are the ones we like the most after looking at the longest.

Yes, this is a difficult point to imagine : what are the limitations of magical power in such a campaign setting ? Ingame, you can almost do everything when you are a priest, a mage or any other spell caster. Druids can also use divine magic, that allows them to control climate, plant growth, and so on...

As I imagine the city, as a capital, it has to show the power of the whole nation, so spending much money and energy only to have fountains and grass in the middle of a hot desert could be not so eccentric. In my opinion, of course...